Infant attachment as intentional action: An ideomotor and event-coding approach on the ontogenetic emergence of attachment.

Abstract

Attachment plays an important role in human development. It relates to various aspects of psychosocial functioning. Yet, the psychological basis of the ontogenetic emergence of attachment is unclear. Following attachment theoretical considerations, I propose that the emergence of attachment needs to be understood in terms of the development of intentional action. Specifically, I propose that ideomotor learning provides a plausible cognitive basis for the emergent goal-directed nature of attachment behavior. This framework explains how attachment emerges in the first instance and how different patterns of attachment are grounded in the dynamics of perception and action in the social world. The article discusses how ideomotor learning provides the basis for infants' learning about the predictability of caregiver responses and how it results in individual differences in the sense of agency. Relying on recent advancements of ideomotor theorizing, I discuss that the early experiences result in event files-integrated patterns of feature codes that bind distributed stimulus and action features-that form the basis of attachment representations. Overall, this account provides a novel framework that helps to understand how attachment emerges as a form of intentional action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).